In one aspect:
A public mobile communication base station is a form of a radio station, and refers to a radio transceiver station which transfers information with a mobile telephone terminal through a mobile communication switching center within a radio coverage area.
A conventional radio base station system has the following features: Each base station is connected to a fixed number of sectoral antennas and covers a small area; each base station can only process received or transmitted signals of respective cells, and the base stations have strict binding relationships with the areas covered by the base stations; resources cannot be shared between base stations, and when the traffic or signaling flow of a base station keeps increasing, the base station may be faulty because of a too heavy processing load; utilization of resources of the base station system is not high, and on the network, some base stations have a too light service load, while some base stations have a too heavy service load, and resources cannot be scheduled efficiently; capabilities of the conventional base station system can be extended only in a scale-up manner, and the expansion of capabilities is limited, for example, limited by the cost, key chips, and so on; for the conventional base station, a virtual base station and a physical base station are not distinguished, and the base station service is strictly bound with the base station device.
The main design idea for the conventional base station virtualization solution is to virtualize resources of a computing node, for example, virtualize a computing node into one or more computing resources, so that one or more virtual base stations are deployed. This method is mainly intended to fully use computing capabilities in a scenario where capabilities of one computing node are sufficient.
FIG. 1 shows a current hierarchical structure of virtual base stations. This solution is mainly installing a layer of management programs (Hypervisor) on a computing node (for example, a multi-core processor), where the programs complete virtualization of the computing node; and installing multiple guest operating systems (Guest OS) above the layer, where base station software is installed above the Guest OS, and different base stations can share computing capabilities of the node (Node).
A disadvantage of the solution lies in that: When computing capabilities of one Node are insufficient, capabilities of the system become a bottleneck; computing capabilities of the system cannot be extended flexibly, and the performance and capacity of the system are restricted by capabilities of the Node.
In one aspect:
RAN sharing can enable multiple operators to share the access infrastructure of a radio network, so as to realize multiple purposes: saving the management expense (Operating Expense, OPEX) and capital expenditure (Capital Expenditure, CAPEX) in infrastructures for the operators; increasing the profit and revenue of the current operators; lowering the barrier to market entry for emerging operators; shifting competitiveness of the operators from the network infrastructure/deployment to service and innovation capabilities; greatly speeding up network deployment; and constructing an environment-friendly network.
There are mainly two types of conventional RAN Sharing architectures: 1. Different cell resources of a base station (Base Transceiver Station, BTS) device are allocated to different operators, and different operators can adjust cell parameters independently, and perform network optimization independently, thus forming differentiated competitive edges. 2. A same cell resource of a base station device may be shared by multiple operators simultaneously, but the operators cannot independently adjust cell related parameters.
The common feature of the two solutions lies in that more operators share an infrastructure. However, different infrastructure units (for example, BTS) are independent, and their resources cannot be shared mutually, and when a BTS is faulty, services of multiple operators are affected; when the service load of an operator on a BTS becomes heavier, more processing resources are occupied, which may squeeze services of another operator, thus affecting quality of service of other operators.
In another aspect:
A multi-standard (or multimode) base station (Base Transceiver Station, BTS) is a mainstream of development of the base station system, and can effectively reduce the network construction cost of an operator. For example, a multimode base station integrating multiple standards occupies less space, and the multimode base station can be installed in an existing equipment room of the base station, so that capital expenditure (Capital Expenditure, CAPEX) is reduced. In addition, the multimode base station shares the transmission device and main device, and its power consumption is also reduced greatly, so that the management expense (Operating Expense, OPEX) is reduced.
The conventional multi-standard base station mainly has two implementation solutions:
1. Using two standards, universal mobile telecommunications system (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System, UMTS) and long term evolution (Long Term Evolution, LTE), as an example, two independent sets of hardware (main control unit, baseband unit, and transmission unit) are designed; the two sets of hardware respectively provide UMTS and LTE services and are completely isolated from each other, the two completely independent systems are installed in one BTS device.
The main disadvantages of the solution are as follows: It is difficult to support other standards: Due to hardware constraints, a new set of hardware is required for supporting a new standard, and its development cost is very high; it is difficult to support more than two standards: If three standards coexist, three sets of hardware are required, but due to space constraints of the BTS, it is possible that there is no enough space to contain three sets of hardware devices, resulting in nonsupport for three modes.
2. Still using the UMTS and LTE standards as an example, in terms of design, hardware is a public hardware platform (main control unit, baseband unit, and transmission unit), and software is a public software platform; services of different standards may run on the public software platform simultaneously.
Compared with solution 1, this solution has a great progress, but also has a disadvantage: In a scenario where multiple standards are concurrent, when services of different standards contend for a same set of hardware resources, the service of one standard may be damaged; when hardware of the BTS is faulty, services of both standards may be damaged and cannot be recovered.
Between solution 1 and solution 2, there are also multiple transitional solutions (for example, sharing of the main control hardware and separation of baseband hardware), which also have the above problems.